A Critical Intel Flaw Breaks Basic Security for Most Computers

A Google-led team of researchers has found a critical chip flaw that developers are scrambling to patch in millions of computers.

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One of the most basic premises of computer security is isolation: If you run somebody else's sketchy code as an untrusted process on your machine, you should restrict it to its own tightly sealed playpen. Otherwise, it might peer into other processes, or snoop around the computer as a whole. So when a security flaw in computers' most deep-seated hardware puts a crack in those walls, as one newly discovered vulnerability in millions of processors has done, it breaks some of the most fundamental protections computers promise—and sends practically the entire industry scrambling.

Earlier this week, security researchers took note of a series of changes Linux and Windows developers began rolling out in beta updates to address a critical security flaw: A bug in Intel chips allows low-privilege processes to access memory in the computer's kernel, the machine's most privileged inner sanctum. Theoretical attacks that exploit that bug, based on quirks in features Intel has implemented for faster processing, could allow malicious software to spy deeply into other processes and data on the target computer or smartphone. And on multi-user machines, like the servers run by Google Cloud Services or Amazon Web Services, they could even allow hackers to break out of one user's process, and instead snoop on other processes running on the same shared server.

On Wednesday evening, a large team of researchers at Google's Project Zero, universities including the Graz University of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Adelaide in Australia, and security companies including Cyberus and Rambus together released the full details of two attacks based on that flaw, which they call Meltdown and Spectre.

"These hardware bugs allow programs to steal data which [is] currently processed on the computer," reads a description of the attacks on a website the researchers created. "While programs are typically not permitted to read data from other programs, a malicious program can exploit Meltdown and Spectre to get hold of secrets stored in the memory of other running programs."

Although both attacks are based on the same general principle, Meltdown allows malicious programs to gain access to higher-privileged parts of a computer's memory, while Spectre steals data from the memory of other applications running on a machine. And while the researchers say that Meltdown is limited to Intel chips, they say that they've verified Spectre attacks on AMD and ARM processors, as well.

Ben Gras, a security researcher with Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who specializes in chip-level hardware security, says that the attacks represent a deep and serious security breach. "With these glitches, if there's any way an attacker can execute code on a machine, it can’t be contained anymore," he says. (Gras was clear that he hadn't participated in any research that unearthed or reproduced the vulnerability, but he has watched the revelations of Intel's vulnerability unfold in the security community.) "For any process that’s untrusted and isolated, that safety is gone now," Gras adds. "Every process can spy on every other process and access secrets in the operating system kernel."

Meltdown and Spectre

Prior to the official revelation of Meltdown and Spectre on Wednesday, Erik Bosman, a colleague of Gras in Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam's VUSEC security group, successfully reproduced one of the Intel attacks, which take advantage of a feature in chips known as "speculative execution." When modern Intel processors execute code and come to a point in an algorithm where instructions branch in two different directions, depending on input data—whether there's enough money in an account to process a transaction, for instance—they save time by "speculatively" venturing down those forks. In other words, they take a guess, and execute instructions to get a head start. If the processor learns that it ventured down the wrong path, it jumps back to the fork in the road, and throws out the speculative work.

VUSEC's Bosman confirmed that when Intel processors perform that speculative execution, they don't fully segregate processes that are meant to be low-privilege and untrusted from the highest-privilege memory in the computer's kernel. That means a hacker can trick the processor into allowing unprivileged code to peek into the kernel's memory with speculative execution.

"The processor basically runs too far ahead, executing instructions that it should not execute," says Daniel Gruss, one of the researchers from the Graz University of Technology who discovered the attacks.

Retrieving any data from that privileged peeking isn't simple, since once the processor stops its speculative execution and jumps back to the fork in its instructions, it throws out the results. But before it does, it stores them in its cache, a collection of temporary memory allotted to the processor to give it quick access to recent data. By carefully crafting requests to the processor and seeing how fast it responds, a hacker's code could figure out whether the requested data is in the cache or not. And with a series of speculative execution and cache probes, he or she can start to assemble parts of the computer's high privilege memory, including even sensitive personal information or passwords.

Many security researchers who spotted signs of developers working to fix that bug had speculated that the Intel flaw merely allowed hackers to defeat a security protection known as Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization, which makes it far more difficult for hackers to find the location of the kernel in memory before they use other tricks to attack it. But Bosman confirms theories that the bug is more serious: It allows malicious code to not only locate the kernel in memory, but steal that memory's contents, too.

"Out of the two things that were speculated, this is the worst outcome," Bosman says.

A Tough Fix

In a statement responding to the Meltdown and Spectre research, Intel noted that "these exploits do not have the potential to corrupt, modify, or delete data," though they do have the ability to spy on privileged data. The statement also argued that "many types of computing devices—with many different vendors’ processors and operating systems—are susceptible to these exploits," mentioning ARM and AMD processors as well.

"I can confirm that Arm have been working together with Intel and AMD to address a side-channel analysis method which exploits speculative execution techniques used in certain high-end processors, including some of our Cortex-A processors," says ARM public relations director Phil Hughes. "This method requires malware running locally and could result in data being accessed from privileged memory." Hughes notes that ARM's IoT-focused Cortex-M line is unaffected.

In an email to WIRED, AMD noted that the research was performed in a "controlled, dedicated lab environment," and that because of its processor architecture the company believes that "there is near zero risk to AMD products at this time."

Microsoft, which relies heavily on Intel processors in its computers, says that it has updates forthcoming to address the problem. "We’re aware of this industry-wide issue and have been working closely with chip manufacturers to develop and test mitigations to protect our customers," the company said in a statement. "We are in the process of deploying mitigations to cloud services and are releasing security updates today to protect Windows customers against vulnerabilities affecting supported hardware chips from AMD, ARM, and Intel. We have not received any information to indicate that these vulnerabilities had been used to attack our customers."

Linux developers have already released a fix, apparently based on a paper recommending deep changes to operating systems known as KAISER, released earlier this year by researchers at the Graz University of Technology.

Apple released a statement Thursday confirming that "all Mac systems and iOS devices are affected," though the Apple Watch is not. "Apple has already released mitigations in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2 to help defend against Meltdown," the company said. "In the coming days we plan to release mitigations in Safari to help defend against Spectre. We continue to develop and test further mitigations for these issues and will release them in upcoming updates of iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS."

Amazon, which offers cloud services on shared server setups, says that it will take steps to resolve the issue soon as well. "This is a vulnerability that has existed for more than 20 years in modern processor architectures like Intel, AMD, and ARM across servers, desktops, and mobile devices," the company said in a statement. "All but a small single-digit percentage of instances across the Amazon EC2 fleet are already protected. The remaining ones will be completed in the next several hours."

Google, which offers similar cloud services, pointed WIRED to a chart of Meltdown and Spectre's effects on its services, which states that the security issue has been resolved in all of the company's infrastructure.

'Out of the two things that were speculated, this is the worst outcome.'

Erik Bosman, VUSEC

Those operating system patches that fix the Intel flaw may also come at a cost: Better isolating the kernel memory from unprivileged memory could create a significant slowdowns for certain processes. According to an analysis by the Register, which was also the first to report on the Intel flaw, those delays could be as much as 30 percent in some cases, although some processes and newer processors are likely to experience less significant slowdowns. Intel, for its part, wrote in its statement that "performance impacts are workload-dependent, and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time."

Until the patches for Meltdown and Spectre roll out more widely, it's not clear just what the speed cost of neutering those attacks may turn out to be. But even if the updates result in a performance hit, it may be a worthwhile safeguard: Better to put the brakes on your processor, perhaps, than allow it to spill your computer's most sensitive secrets.

This story has been updated to include comment by Intel, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, AM, ARM, and Apple, as well as full research details from Google's Project Zero et al.